Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 777

About this issue

This 1892 issue of Beadle and Adams's weekly presents "The River Blacklegs' Terror," a serial romance by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham subtitled "A Romance of the Realities of the Secret Service." The narrative introduces Dick Doom (also called Dixie Gray), an eighteen-year-old youth with mysterious origins who has rescued the Grayhurst siblings from highway bandits and later becomes a detective. After confiding to the police chief his intention to pursue detection, Doom boards a Mississippi steamboat disguised as a hayseed. Two young physicians aboard—Doctors Hilgartner and Parsons—recognize a man resembling someone who solicited their help years earlier to exhume a wealthy planter's body for secret autopsy. That examination had revealed poison in the corpse. The physicians debate confronting the suspicious stranger, creating suspense around his true identity and intentions.